UTFacultiesEEMCSNewsThomas Neele takes second prize in de Ngi-NGN Informatics Thesis Prize

Thomas Neele takes second prize in de Ngi-NGN Informatics Thesis Prize

On 28 November, Thomas Neele will be presented with the second prize in the Ngi-NGN Informatics Thesis Prize for Computer Science and Information Science 2016 for his graduation thesis.

The award is worth € 1,000 and will be presented at the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) in Haarlem. Thomas’s graduation thesis entitled GPU Implementation of Partial-Order Reduction shows how a model checking tool can be speeded up and improved on a graphic processor (GPU), making it faster and easier to test software.

Model checking helps to guarantee that critical software in an MRI scanner or driverless car, for example, does not contain faults (bugs). To make a full and reliable check, these model checking programmes must be able to carry out millions of analyses and calculations at great speed.

Thomas did his graduation research at Eindhoven University of Technology. Looking for a technique that could test software programmes swiftly and efficiently, he combined GPUs (graphical processing unit/video card), which have great calculation power but little memory, with partial order reduction. On the basis of this theory, he was able to limit the memory use of the fast GPU tool and increase its practical applicability.

Several variants of partial order reduction are described in the literature, but Thomas is the first person to use GPU with partial order reduction on model checking. He applied three versions in a GPU tool belonging to TU Eindhoven and compared their performance. He also managed to make the GPU tool work eleven times faster, and formulated the proof of correctness for the algorithms for GPU he had designed. The jury was impressed by his research achievements and the quality of his well-written thesis.

About the Ngi-NGN Informatics Thesis Prize for Computer Science and Information Science

For the past ten years, we have been awarding an annual prize (worth € 5,000) for the best thesis. The winning thesis must make a relevant, innovative and practical contribution to the field of computing and information science. We hope that giving outstanding students a platform and demonstrating our appreciation of their work will help to banish the culture of ‘just scraping through’ and inspire more students to take an IT-related degree programme. Candidates are put forward by the lecturers responsible for teaching and assessing the students, and an independent jury headed by the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) decides on the winner.

The Ngi-NGN Informatics Thesis Prize for Computer Science and Information Science 2016 (€ 5,000) went to Yfke Dulek (University of Amsterdam) for her thesis entitled Quantum homomorphic encryption for polynomial-sized circuits. She developed a unique encryption method, which will in future enable third parties to carry out calculations on encrypted quantum data without having to decode the data. The other second prize went to Roel Jacobs (TU Eindhoven) for his thesis entitled Constructing Maps by Clustering Trajectories. Ngi-NGN is a Dutch computer society run by and for IT professionals, which serves as an independent platform on which members can expand their knowledge and their networks.

The Ngi-NGN Informatics Thesis Prize will be presented on 28 November by Maarten Emons, member of the board of the Ngi-NGN Platform for IT professionals. The jury was provided by the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) in Haarlem, a society responsible for judging countless important scientific competitions.

L.P.W. van der Velde MSc (Laurens)
Spokesperson Executive Board (EB)